CANTZ

Published by Richter Verlag.Essays by Robert Hobbs, Richard Milazzo, Kevin Power and Pia Müller-Tamm.

The American painter Jonathan Lasker has plumbed the possibilities of abstract vocabularies, searching for a worldwide idiom for Modernism in the wake of the end of abstraction. In his large-scale, color-intensive paintings, the artist uses a relatively limited repertoire of visual signs from recent art history. From the formal vocabulary of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, geometric abstraction, and Pattern & Decoration, he has created exciting new constellations. His biomorphic forms, calligraphic shorthand, fields of stripes and lines, grid structures and checkerboard patterns morph on the canvas into images of conflict--and thus into particularly contemporary manifestations. This publication focuses on Lasker's oil paintings from the 1970s, supplemented by drawings and preliminary sketches.